Iowa voices from Ty Olsen

Iowa memories from Ty Olsen.  

Steve was kind-hearted, honest and always lively.  He was stubborn, but among us Iowans, stubbornness is often considered a positive trait, and I certainly considered it a positive trait in Steve's case.

Yes, Steve and I go back a long way, to 1958, I think.  His family moved in next door to us when his father was appointed pastor of the Methodist church down the street, and we quickly became friends.

Some of the things I remember:

In the summer of 1959, it must have been, we checked out weights from the East High School football coach and took them up in Steve's attic, where we worked out with them regularly, in what seemed to be about 110 degree August heat, to get in shape for football.

In the summer of 1960, it must have been, Steve and Gerry Perrin (another friend) and I went on a camping trip in the Black Hills, of which I have many memories, and, somewhere, some photos.  Steve was always making friends with other campers on that trip, and one day, he made friends with this older couple from Iowa.  (Steve greeted anyone who was from Iowa -- we could often tell by the license plate -- as a long lost friend, as if we had been a million miles from home.)  The next day, we were going to go spelunking in some caves we had found out about, which were not big enough or near enough to major roads to have been exploited commercially, and to Gerry's and my chagrin, Steve invited this couple to come along, and they accepted.  I didn't think we had enough room for everybody in my mother's car, so the couple followed along in this old junker they were driving.  They tried to follow us on some rutted roads which were really no more than cowpaths, and they kept getting slower and slower, and Steve kept saying we had to wait for them.  Finally, they turned back.  For months, maybe years, after that, whenever we were going to do anything together, we would rag Steve about this and make him promise not to make any new friends, especially none from Iowa.

I went off to college in the fall of 1960, but Steve and I remained good friends after that.  I wrote him frequent letters, and he responded.

In the summer of 1961, it must have been, we built a raft in my garage out of six 55 gallon drums and some scrap wood we found in a dump.  Our friend Gerry Perrin again participated, but he chickened out when it came time actually to get on the raft and sail it down the Missouri River.  So it was Steve and I who made the river trip.  The trip lasted about 28 hours, from a Friday night after we got off work, until Saturday night, about 10 pm, when we docked the raft on the riverbank and hiked into this small town in Nebraska, called my parents and asked them to pick us up, which they did.  We made a huge number of mistakes in designing and testing the raft and, in particular, in designing the control system for the raft -- we had one big rudderlike paddle, but we should have had two small paddles, for with only the one big one, we were at the mercy of the river.  We had thought we could just lay back on the raft and watch the scenery go by, but in fact we had to work hard every minute to avoid problems, like branches extending out over the surface of the river in a position to sweep us off the raft as we went by.  Long story short, we got no sleep at all in the 28 hours we were on the river, and also we had eaten essentially no food (though we had brought food along), because there was no time.  At the end of the trip, I was as tired and hungry as I can ever remember being.  It was the same with Steve.  My parents had hoped we would regale them with stories about our trip on the way home from picking us up, but we were both so tired we were falling asleep while chewing bites of a hamburger, just before they arrived to get us, and we couldn't think clearly enough to tell my parents anything.

During this trip, we stopped once along the shore of the river to build a fire and try to dry out -- we had been swept off the raft in one of the minor disasters which befell us on this trip.  The shore of the Missouri at this point is in the Winnebago Indian Reservation, and two Indians, both about our age, came over to find out what we were doing there.  Parker and Weasel, they said their names were.  Steve, of course, instantly made friends with them.  He invited them to join us on the raft to sail down the river about six more miles to the town where we ultimately abandoned the raft, and they said yes.  It was a small raft, and really there was room only for two people to set comfortably on it, but it worked out well, since we adopted a sort of rotation whereby two of us at a time rode the raft and the other two swam in the river, pushing the raft as they swam, to keep the raft out of trouble.  It was in this fashion that we made it to the little Nebraska town where my parents picked us up, in a reasonable time.  I am not sure what would have happened to us on this trip if we had not met Parker and Weasel.  The outcome might not have been so good.

Anyway, Steve was adventurous and bold when he was young, and also, so it seemed to me, when he grew up.  He was always a good and loyal friend.

Ty Olsen